st: RE: RE: recovering -table- output for programmatic use

[Charles Vellutini <charles.vellutini@ecopa.com>]

Thanks Nick. I see your point and yes that works for me -- one is so used to Excel's pivot tables that my initial intuition was to look for the exact equivalent in Stata. Successive -collapse- (with -preserve- and -restore- before and after) indeed achieve what I need. Another solution is to combine a -collapse- (with one fewer dimension in the -by()- option) and then do a -tabsat-; this is in fact what I am doing since I can then recover the output in matrices, which I find convenient.

Thanks,
Charles

-----Message d'origine-----
De : owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu [mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] De la part de Nick Cox
Envoyé : lundi 6 février 2012 16:29
À : 'statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu'
Objet : st: RE: recovering -table- output for programmatic use

I am not so sure as you. The short answer is that -table- leaves nothing useful in memory. It is designed as a reporting command, not as an estimation or calculation command. 

Besides, what would you expect to be available? Even simple -table- statements could generate several matrices' equivalent in output, and retrieving that would be a pain, however well it was ordered. 

There's a much nicer answer. In essence, -table- is a wrapper for -collapse-. What you get shown by -table- is available by an equivalent -collapse-, or that's what it looks like from here. 

For example, 

. sysuse auto
(1978 Automobile Data)

. table for rep78, c(mean mpg sd mpg)

------------------------------------------------------------
          |                Repair Record 1978               
 Car type |        1         2         3         4         5
----------+-------------------------------------------------
 Domestic |       21    19.125        19   18.4444        32
          |  4.24264  3.758324  4.085622  4.585606  2.828427
          | 
  Foreign |                      23.3333   24.8889   26.3333
          |                     2.516612  2.713137  9.367497
------------------------------------------------------------


. collapse (mean)mean=mpg (sd)sd=mpg, by(for rep78)

. l

     +--------------------------------------+
     | rep78    foreign      mean        sd |
     |--------------------------------------|
  1. |     1   Domestic        21   4.24264 |
  2. |     2   Domestic    19.125   3.75832 |
  3. |     3   Domestic        19   4.08562 |
  4. |     4   Domestic   18.4444   4.58561 |
  5. |     5   Domestic        32   2.82843 |
     |--------------------------------------|
  6. |     .   Domestic     23.25   3.40343 |
  7. |     3    Foreign   23.3333   2.51661 |
  8. |     4    Foreign   24.8889   2.71314 |
  9. |     5    Foreign   26.3333    9.3675 |
 10. |     .    Foreign        14         . |
     +--------------------------------------+

If that doesn't work for you, show the -table- commands you are using. 

Nick 
n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk 

Charles Vellutini

This question has been asked before but I have not found the simple exact solution (that I am sure must exist). So here it is: how do we recover the output of a -table- command for programmatric use, ideally as a matrix? I am aware of the user-written -tabstatmat- command but that works only with -tabstat-. 

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